Quick to anger but even quicker to boredom.

"Christopher Nolan's epic opus The Dark Knight Rises has been marred by what Hollywood insiders have termed a 'viral gone violent' marketing campaign. Although details at this stage are scant, it is believed that the marketing team behind the publicity for The Dark Knight Rises tried to get on the fan-wagon and in doing so coaxed a member of the public into dressing up as one of the characters of the film and performing what was described as 'explosive performance art'. In a statement released earlier today the marketing team has criticized the shooter, saying that his actions were 'disappointing and did not live up to their expectations, we were hoping for more than 12. His performance was as lackluster as Christian Bales but at least his actions had an air of believability about them, unlike the fore mentioned Mr Bale, whose stilted and emotionless dialogue is not fooling anyone. Yes this is a tragedy, yes innocent people died but look at it from our point of view, every time this story gets mentioned the film gets talked about. That's the sort of brand awareness you just can't buy'."

I spent all day yesterday writing this piece. I woke up in the morning, checked the news, saw the story and then in the shower I had the idea. I made the mistake of not plunging right into it and I spent too much time thinking about it so I by the time I sat down to write it the whole idea was over thought, which is why it's short and not very good. I also made the mistake of reading as much as I could about the incident and in doing so I realised that I no longer found it funny, and the reason I no longer found it funny was I was no longer interested in what happened. Don't get me wrong, I didn't have a moral epiphany or anything like that, I just became bored with it. It's not like I cry when I see it on the news, it's that I change the channel and scratch myself. It's unfortunately an all too familiar scenario. Disenchanted person with social problems takes long standing anger out on strangers. Couple that with easy access to firearms and the results are often in the double figures. But the thing is, people die all the time and many of them are innocent. Look at the drug wars in Mexico. Look at Iraq or Afghanistan. The civilian death tolls are way higher than those of  the combatants. Oh man, now I don't even care about this.

I don't know what I'm trying to say. I'm not trying to say 'We all need peace' because we do but it's a pipe dream. It is human nature to fight. And yeah, sometimes it's human nature to kill. It is also becoming human nature to wig the fuck out and try and take as many with you was you can, apparently. Whatever it is, the one thing it's not is surprising. Let's see if an out of context clip of Walter White can shed some light on it.

One thing that I was impressed with, and I'm not sure if I'm using impressed right but I was impressed with the speed that the trolls came out. Last night I drunkenly followed someone on twitter who had started a James Holmes account which, admittedly, opened with the excellent 'I'm was always more of a Superman guy' but the jokes did not really improve. I un-followed him this morning if that makes you feel any better. The joke is really a one hit wonder, start a twitter account and be a cunt, not much to it really. What I like even less is the barrage of tweets and messages from everybody else. "OMG pray for those in Colorado, my heart goes out to them." Really? Do you really actually care other than the knee jerk human reaction of 'that's terrible?' What exactly did you do besides post a message on some social media site? You thought about it for 20 seconds? That's fantastic. Now go back to MSN chat and spelling words with letters, you seem to care about as much as I do, which is a bit but then you forget about it. I suppose it's better than going on 4chan and making a meme out of the whole situation.

I think what concerns me most if the people who will be checking the news every hour to find out more information for no other reason than to satisfy some inner craving to know all the terrible details. I'm the same with serial killers, and that too concerns me. Why are we so fascinated by extreme acts of violence? Is it because we all secretly wish we could foist our masochistic desires on others or is it something a lot sicker and darker than that. We are now all voyeurs of violence, we hate it when bad things happen but secretly we love it when bad things happen to other people. Is it a form of pornography? To quote Merriam-Webster: "the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction (the pornography of violence)".


Our free thinking and progressive society loves sex and violence. For a while there we really liked them together at the same time but I have this feeling that in the future we will chose violence over sex because to commit an act of violence often involves no emotional content where as most people have some emotional connection to sex. And it's easier to commit random acts of violence against strangers than it is random acts of sex. And that's not a rape joke, it just is. We have fetishised violence, made it something cool and desirable and edgy. In embracing the dark nature of our psyche we have let the animal out of the cage, unaware of how much damage it might do.   

 Coupled with the fact that the media loves misery and you get a perpetual hurt machine. It goes like this; The general public are secretly fascinated with acts of extreme violence and so when they happen everybody tunes in so the media thinks they're onto something so they report it more and like the dogs we are we lap it up, not realising that the whole time we are being desensitised so that when they next random act of violence comes along we will be a little bit more bored of it so it will need to be ultra violent just to get our attention. And so the next 'shocking and depraved' act comes along until soon nothing is too shocking and nothing is too depraved and nothing is too far from our reality. And then what? Where do we go from here?


This is long and rambling and I've barely made a point let alone had anything interesting to say. If I can leave you with one piece of advice it's this. Don't care. Don't care so much about things that you have no control over. The less time we spend feeding the media the less hungry it will be. Think of it like you're putting it on a diet. Feed it less and it's stomach will shrink and it's appetite won't be so voracious. Hopefully if we do that then the media will take the hint and go back to doing what it does best, being bought out by billionaires and having semi-naked athletes on the cover because the Olympic games are on soon. Retarded as that is, it's better than trying to get photos of mothers holding their dead children.


Authors note: I am aware of the gaping hypocrisies in this piece. But I'm afraid that I just don't care.